Travel Book Review ~ Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett - 'From Checkout to Cotton Field - Travels Through The New China'

Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett. ISBN 1847370012.  First published 2008 by Simon & Schuster UK. We usually have a copy in stock, click here to see if we have one in stock now.

After a brief visit to China I developed an obsession with the place. Not the tourist brochure China, but the ugly, smoggy, grey, industrial, concrete 'New China.' The China of barely harnessed capitalism and growth. The tourist brochure China's ugly cousin.  In this spirit, and enticed by the funny title, I picked up Joe Bennett's Where Underpants Come From.

This is the first Joe Bennett book I have read. He is one of those authors I have noticed, over a few years of selling used books, that has a small but merry and very dedicated band of followers, his books always trickle off my shelves. Joe Bennett is an English born New Zealander and he is very, very funny. On the cover of another Joe Bennett book his publisher calls him "the master of brevity", which sums up him my liking for his writing. He writes with an easy, fluid, funny, yet intelligent style, and pens a mean turn of phrase. I was an instant Joe Bennett fan just a a few pages into Where Underpants Come From.

Joe Bennett comes up with the idea for the book while underpant shopping in New Zealand, puzzled at how an earth a six pack of underpants can be made in China and shipped across the world through various middlemen, and sold for only NZ $8.59. He decides to travel to China to trace his underpants right to the source, with varying degrees of success.

It's a fun and easy read. I loved this book to bits, but I'm the first to admit I have eclectic tastes. As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you.

Chapter 1....

Within living memory, men's underpants were simple. They were white and capacious. When eventually discarded they were more capacious, but less white. Today they are less simple. The displays in The Warehouse in a Christchurch shopping mall hold perhaps a hundred varieties of underpants, from satin boxer shorts with scarlet hearts, to hugging hipsters with pictures of racing cars.

I buy six pairs. Five come rolled in a clear plastic pouch and they cost me NZ$8.59. They are the simplest, plainest briefs for daily wear. The sixth pair is for special occasions. They are black with a grey waistband into which the word 'Authentic' is embroidered. There is no vent at the front, but there are two stickers where a vent should be. One says 'stretch' and illustrates the verb with arrows going in all directions. The other says 'double front'. In other words, these pants will accommodate an erection and absorb accidents.

Underpants ought to be a swift purchase because the only consideration is practicality, but it takes me a minute or two to settle on the Authentics. What delays me is vanity. I want the pants to flatter me a little. It is a rediculous concern. No one will ever see these underpants except my dogs and perhaps the occasional sexual partner. The dogs will take no interest, and if a sexual partner and I reach the underpant stage, then, frankly, it's a done deal. It would take more than pictures of racing cars to halt the momentum. Nevertheless I am clearly not alone in taking aesthetic considerations into account, otherwise there would be not a hundred different varieties of underpants.

The waistband tells me that my Authentics were made in China from cotton and elastine. Another label says 'CLASS' in capital letters, and on the reverse, 'Mens Lifestyle Underwear combines fashion styling with functional features for all-day comfort.' Despite the word 'lifestyle', the euphemisms, the needless capitalization and the missing apostrophe, I have to acknowledge that the label reflects my reasons for choosing these pants. They are conventional and sturdy, which is more or less how I am, but with a hint of elegance, which is how I'm not. But it is how I would like to be. These pants are aspirational. They cost $NZ 8.59.

On the way home, with my pants in a bag on the seat beside me, it strikes me as remarkable that underpants can be made in China and transported to New Zealand, passing through the hands of, and making a profit for, I don't know how many middle men, and still be sold to me for just NZ$5.99. And as for the pack of five pairs for NZ$8.59, well, the economics of it is beyond me.

It also strikes me that I have effectively no idea how to make a pair of underpants. I know the cotton grows on bushes in rabbit-tail tufts, but not how those tufts become thread, or the thread cloth. Is the spinning jenny involved? And what about the waistband? I suspect the involvement of elastic presumably means rubber, but what is the relationship between rubber, elastic and elastine?

My ignorance of underpants is representative of a far wider ignorance. In forty-nine years I have learned next to nothing about the commercial and industrial processes on which my easy existence depends. If some cataclysm were to reduce society to a few survivors, I'd be the one sitting on a heap of rubble with his head in his hands and no idea how to start again.

Back home my dogs follow me to the bedroom, where I pose before the mirror in my Authentics. The dogs display every bit as much interest in the pants as you would expect. But I have become interested in the pants, so interested that I send an email to my agent in London. 'Jim' it says, 'I've got this idea for a book and I need to someone to tell me it's a crap idea.'

I explain that I want to find out everything I can about a single pair of Chinese underpants, to trace them all the way back, if possible, to the source of their raw materials. In the process I hope to discover everything I can about the commercial world on which we all depend but to which I know so little. At the same time I want to learn something about the ever-growing called China. And it seems such a fine idea to me that without waiting for a reply I set about the research.

A little on underpant specifiations, construction and economics...

...I find myself studying the specifications with an interest I never though I'd feel. 'Legs and waist must have elastic tunnelled and twin needle flat locked down on the raw edges. Elastic must overlap by three cm at the start/finish of waist and each leg. the front has a dart at the gusset seam. Front panel is double ply bagged out and fully enclosed into the centre front panel seams.'

Nothing, it seems, is left to chance. The fabric must be 'carded A grade cotton single jersey at 135 GSM', and it must undergo lab tests for 'dimensional stability, spirality, colour fastness, stretch and recovery.' And on my medium-size pants the dart on the gusset must be 6 centimetres long. I borrow a ruler. The dart on my gusset is 6 centimetres long. Precisely.

Having been drawn up in New Zealand, the specifcations for my pants were put out for tender with accredited Chinese businesses. The company that won the tender had to make up a sample batch that was checked in this office, then sent to New Zealand to be rechecked. Then a pre-production sample, accompanied by authorized lab test results, underwent hte same double inspection. then a final post-production sample, in other words a specimen drawn from the completed order, was checked. Only then came permission to ship.

TWL negotiated a price FOB, in other words all costs involved in getting my underpants made and loaded on to a ship were borne by the manufacturer. After that TWL paid all costs.

Jenny's research has also unearthed the bill of lading. My underpants left the factory of Kingstar Light Industrial Products in Quanzhou on 17 October 2006, grouped into packs of give, labelled and ready to go on sale. There were 15,000 packs: 1500 small, 3300 medium, 3450 large, 3450 XL, 1800 2XL, and 1500 in the comically gargantuan 3XL. In other words, medium is no longer the median size. Since sizes were standardized, New Zealanders, like the rest of the West, have got fat.

The 75,000 pairs of underpants, weighing 4837.5 kilos and occupying 25.796 cubic metres, were packed into a container by the manufacturers, who declared to the quarantine authorities that the container was free of live organisms, material of plant or animal origin, soil and water. The container was driven to the port of Xiamen, shipped on the Cosco Longbeach, and transferred to the ocean going Maersk Niigata which sailed south-west for twenty days and docked in Auckland on 9 November. From there the underpants were distributed to stores and offered for sale to the variously proportioned men of New Zealand, whose backsides they now embrace, drips absorb and erections restrain.

I would love to include some passages on the Chinese factories but that's spoiler territory. Instead I include this piece that to me, sums up the joys and unique cultural exchanges you encounter when eating with the locals in Asia, something I'm just a little obsessed with (see our street food blog)...

Chance has served me up what seems a splendid restaurant. It is three quarters full and I am the only westerner. The patrons range in age from six to sixty. They are eating, drinking and smoking with vigour, but above all they are talking, or rather shouting. The place sounds happy.

The maitresse d' looks the opposite. She is wearing what looks like the uniform of a London parking warden and her hair is tied back in a manner that the Soviet Union's champion woman tractor driver of 1956 would have found just a little severe. Nevertheless we conduct an entirely satisfactory conversation which consists of  Chinese on her part and gestures on mine, and which establishes that I want a table for one and a big bottle of local beer, that one over there in the fridge that advertises Budweiser but, fortunately, hasn't got any Budweiser in it.

A waitress brings the beer. 'Shia shia' I say and she giggles. It would be nice to know a phrase in English that was so infallibly amusing. Another waitress brings me a bowl, chopsticks, a ceramic spoon and a twenty page menu listing every part of every beast or fish or bird I've ever eaten plus a hundred I haven't. Many dishes are illustrated with photographs. And every dish is translated in English.

'Braised chicken intestine with satay sauce' looks more tempting than 'stewed pigs tendons with assorted meats' but I pass on both. I don't choose the pigeon soup either. From the illustrative photo it is impressively clear that pigeon soup means pigeon soup. The soup is a broth with a few vegetable slithers floating on its surface. The pigeon is a pigeon. It lies slumped on its side in the broth. The difference between this pigeon and one in the street is only that this one is dead and plucked. Its claws poke over one side of the bowl, its head flops over another, its eyes and beak are intact, and its skin is the colour of putty.

I order twice fried pork with cabbage Sichuan-style, stir-fried beef with lemon, a plate of assorted vegetables and a beer to replace the first one which seems to have evaporated.

On the next table a man with glasses a quarter of an inch thick, a roll-neck sweater and a lantern jaw is holding forth. He is the wag of his party. Four men smoke and listen to him, occasionally breaking into throaty, uninhibited laughter. A woman pays equal attention to the wag and to the tattered head of a carp that she is holding in chopsticks while she gnaws at its cheek. The wag notes I am watching and addresses me loudly. I gesture incomprehension by shoving forth my lower lip and flattening my palms like a waiter carrying a two-foot-wide tray at shoulder level. Everyone laughs. One of the men raises a glass to me. I raise a glass in response and hit a waitress smack on the forearm with it. Beer flies. The men laugh. The woman drops her fish head. The maitress d' scurries over looking as though she's just lost her tractor-driving title, scolds the waitress, summons three others with cloths and addresses me a manner that clearly indicates that I, who am in every way to blame, am in no way to blame.

If I eat Chinese food in the West I unashamedly ask for a knife and fork, but on the when-in-Rome principle I am determined to master chopsticks. My twice-fried pork with cabbage Sichuan-style turns out to have been coated with Teflon. I manage to move five slivers from plate to the tablecloth and one from the plate to my crotch. When I finally get a piece of cabbage to my mouth, I do so my a neat last-second flick of the jaw as it falls. Then I wish I hadn't, partly because the man in the roll-neck sweater applauds and partly because the cabbage is off -the-Richter-scale hot.

I have never coped with hot food. Sweat erupts on my forehead in an instant. I gasp and reach for the beer, drink a glass at a single gulp, refill it. drink again. look up and see half the restaurant grinning at me. Red of face, I raise my beer to them all everyone laughs. I mean everyone. I may never get a job as an interpreter in China but there's a living to be made as an entertainer.

...And I surprise myself be feeling happy. Just plain bouyant happy. I do not feel that I have pierced to the heart of Chinese society. I do not feel that I have made a clutch of new friends. But I do feel that I have lost, permanently, a prejudice born of ignorance and propaganda. Everything I have ever heard or read about this country stressed its difference. But a few trivial merry minutes in a middle-of-the-road restaurant on a damp Wednesday evening in Shanghai have stressed its similarity. These are people and I am familiar with people. What's more they are easy-going people, people who like a laugh and people who don't consider a restaurant meal to be an exercise in isolation, formality or social pretension.

Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett. ISBN 1847370012.  First published 2008 by Simon & Schuster UK. We usually have a copy in stock, click here to see if we have one in stock now.